Céline's Journey to the End of the Night - Review

A Comedy Without Light

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit) is an essential work of absurdist literature - a worthy companion-piece to Albert Camus's The Outsider and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. A book that is both savagely funny and monstrously bleak, it takes a long and critical look at human nature and leaves little room for optimism. Céline's assessment of humanity is uncompromisingly nihilistic, and through the barely endurable experiences of the writer's fictional alter ego, Ferdinand Bardamu, we come to see the world we inhabit as nothing more than a Hell which mankind has created for itself, out of greed, spite and stupidity. Céline's first novel (for which the writer drew heavily on his own personal experiences), it was published in 1932 and soon became one of the most influential works of literature of the 20th century, having a significant impact on writers as diverse as Jean Genet, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Günter Grass and, of course, Beckett.

Beginning with the horrors of the First World War, which are described in a colloquial, matter-of-fact way that adds to the stark grotesqueness of the situation, Journey to the End of the Night charts mankind's ever worsening decline towards primal savagery, culminating in the injustices of the present day. Céline sees the first three decades of the 20th century as the beginning of a continuing, unstoppable process of dehumanisation and moral decay, driven and accelerated by man's inherent nastiness and unerring capacity for self-destruction. Political and capitalist forces, the product of untameble vices such as greed and intolerance, provide the motor for the engine that is driving man ineluctably towards his eventual extinction. Compelling and repellent in equal measure, but with a message that is hard to refute, this is a book that feels harrowingly pertinent for our own time.

After surviving the blood-saturated abattoir that was the stage of the so-called War to End All Wars, Céline's drifting anti-hero has a brief sortie in French colonial Africa and finds himself in a tropical nightmare that strongly evokes Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. This flagrant foray into pungent anti-colonial sentiment is followed by the book's most outrageously satirical passage, set in a rabidly commercialised America that, in a similar vein to Chaplin's Modern Times, shows the human animal being robbed of its last vestiges of autonomy. In this manic dystopian free-for-all, man is nothing more than an unthinking component of an infernal machine, our totem to the Great God Profit.

Céline's one great novel (his subsequent work has nothing like the literary merit or impact of this one) conjures up a vision of man's collective failure that evokes and transcends Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost. No longer can we attribute our woes to dark Satanic forces. There is no malevolent fallen angel, no tempter in the garden. We have brought all this upon ourselves. There is a heart-wrenching poignancy to the final section of the novel, where the resolve of the central protagonist to help others as an impoverished doctor in a poor district of Paris is gradually chiselled away. But by this stage he knows, as we do, that he is tilting at windmills. To quote the poet Blake, we are born to misery and must accept that we live in endless night. After wallowing in a swamp of unrelenting pessimism for the best part of four hundred pages, the narrative closes with the merest whisper of hope. Bardamu's acceptance of his predicament - and hence the fate of all mankind - is in itself a sort of redemption. You can't help wondering, though, if even here Céline is being ironic.